About the Coverwall

From John and Yoko to Miley Cyrus, Annie Leibovitz to David LaChapelle, the cover of Rolling Stone has always been an art form in its own right. Now you can explore all our covers, and read full articles from classic issues dating back to our 1967 launch in our brand-new Cover Wall.
Explore the Coverwall »

Jimmy Page Used Led Zeppelin Superfans to Help With New Reissues

Jimmy Fallon ceded his title as "The Coolest Jimmy in Late Night" to Jimmy Page when the Led Zeppelin guitarist stopped by The Tonight Show on Wednesday to talk about the upcoming vinyl reissues of Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IIand Led Zeppelin III. After Fallon revealed he found his first Zeppelin album in the woods, the two dug into the massive sets and all the legwork Page had to put into the expansive new sets.

Along with remastering the albums themselves, Page dug through his own collection of recordings and the Zeppelin vaults — "Are they under the ocean somewhere?" Fallon cracked — to create companion discs for the original albums. "It gives you a little window into it, a little doorway, so you get an extra dimension of what was going on in that times," Page said.

To make sure he included the most unique material, Page even enlisted the help of a few unlikely people: Hardcore Led Zeppelin fans that he found online. "It was a question of if some of that stuff had come out across the years — not what I had at home, but certain material from the studio had leaked out, come out on bootleg," Page explained. "So when I started listening to all this analog tape — and it took hundreds of hours to do this — I just wanted to make sure that the material I had hadn't come out on bootleg. I had to check with certain people in the know."

Despite the new reissue campaign — which will continue and eventually cover every Led Zeppelin album — the band has no plans to reunite for a live gig. "A tour would have been an absolute menagerie of vested interests and the very essence of everything that's shitty about big-time stadium rock," Robert Plant recently told Rolling Stone. "We were surrounded by a circus of people that would have had our souls on the fire. I'm not part of a jukebox!"